June 20, 2009

The old apartment rule

This evening I had dinner with a friend who just bought a new car and consequently sold his former car, a dilapidated old second-hand BWM that had become totally unreliable. He described poignantly how sad it was to part with the old car, despite how much he’s enjoying having a new one. The sense of finality, of parting with an old friend, etc. I compared it to the dislocating feeling when you move out of a flat you’ve lived in for a few years, hand over the keys and just walk away.

I think it would be nice if there was an agreed-upon social convention whereupon you could show up at an apartment you had lived in before, explain that you were a previous resident and reasonably expect to be shown around for a few quick minutes. Not as some strange favor, but simply as a quirk of agreed-upon social convention.

sycamore

Clarion Alley, San Francisco. This was the back exit of my old apartment on Sycamore Alley.

4 recent favorite quotes

1. “My poems may offend the dead, but the dead belong to me.” (Unknown)

2. “Everything ends badly, or it wouldn’t end at all” – Tom Cruise movie Cocktail

3. “In the war between the grasses and the trees, humans have greatly helped out on the side of the grasses.” (Unknown)

4. “There’s no I in ‘team’… but there is one in ‘win’.” – Michael Jordan

Edit: reader SP points out that quote 3 is Michael Pollan. And she should know, as I nicked the quote from her.

Robot Doubles

radio_shack1 Spring is always the most listless semester in my teaching gig. Energy is low, weather is good, and class attendance basically collapses once the beer gardens open in mid-April. One weeknight not long ago, I was feeling uninspired to teach one of my more droopy classes, and remembered my robot doubles concept from many years ago:

Let’s say that everyone had (or could easily purchase, at least) a robot double that looks almost exactly like you and has about 70% of your mental capabilities. You could send your Robo off to take care of minor errands for you (say, picking up a package from the post office) and be pretty confident that he/she would be up for the task. There would probably be legalese written into many social transactions that forbid people from sending their Robos on their behalf and maybe even ‘No Robos’ stickers on certain storefronts (the DMV, for instance), but for the most part you could be confident that nobody would notice the switch.

But the question would be whether you would dare to send your Robo off to deal with more complex and critical tasks. I imagine people getting busted periodically for sending their Robo to work for them while they stayed home and slept in. In extreme cases, faltering marriages would collapse when one already-jaded partner detected that their husband or wife had sent their Robo home to deal with them so they could sit in a bar or have an affair. The Robo problem would crop up especially in school– I can almost imagine certain students of mine trying to pass off deficient robotic doubles of themselves if they had the chance. But then again, they also might notice that the person teaching them was, in fact, a Robo. The real question would be whether our Robos would be capable of detecting other Robos, and if so whether they would inform their Humans, or whether they would instead form a tacit alliance to keep it a secret among themselves.

The New Moscow Philosophy

Here’s the other book cover I’ve made for Twisted Spoon in the past year (first one is here): Vyachelsav Pyetsukh’s The New Moscow Philosophy. This one should be going to print some time over the summer.

New Moscow Philosophy

A bunch of Moscovites live crammed together in a flat originally intended for a single family during more prosperous times. When one elderly tenant mysteriously disappears, the residents start jockeying over her living space. The apartment itself is presented as the the dominant character of the story in a sense (the author introduces you to it before any of the characters, and its crowded conditions define the experience of most of the characters), so it seemed to make sense to feature it on the cover as the ‘protagonist’. The disappearance of the elderly tenant, moreover, is turned into a kind of meta-absurdist whodunnit, with conscious literary references to Crime and Punishment. So, hence, the ‘Colonel Mustard did it in the study with the revolver’ aspect of the design.

I’ve always had a fetish of sorts for floorplans, so it was fun to do a design around one. I only hope that I got the layout of the flat more or less correct– it was difficult to figure out on paper, nonwithstanding the author’s meticulous descriptions of which room is where.